(08-21-2019, 10:10 PM)completelycharged Wrote: Low earth orbit would give you around 3 minutes at a high angle once every few days or closer to once a week if minimal atmospheric absorbtion is needed. This would then provide a good average of around 14 hours per day of charge time between targets or approx 100 hours of solar charge time.

With 1kW of panels that gives you about 100kWh (making the math easier).

For a laser you would need a whole lot more capacity in the form of supercaps, closer to about 20kW.

If you can shorten the pulse duration down (without vapourising the satellite in the process) to about 1uS then the pulse energy would be around 72TW.

Say efficiency of the whole setup is quite poor at only 5% then you end up with 3.6TW

Taking into account the odd insect absorbing a few MW turning into a ball of plasma and a bird, which could end up a quite spectacular plasma explosion and zap quite a few MW of output...

I think this could take some of the roof off but the 100kWh pack would have to be capable of discharging within 3 minutes with a discharge rate of 2MW to allow for 5 shots...

Fit it all into a Tesla Roadster, launch it and sit a starman in it, post it all over the internet, nobody is any wiser.

Jesus Christ that was thorough! I shoulda known someone would actually have the breakdown to make a doomsday laser here